California has banned plastic straws. Free Technical Library News

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California bans plastic straws

26.09.2018

California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill that will allow restaurants to dispense plastic straws for soft drinks only at the request of a visitor - by default, soda will now have to be drunk directly from a glass.

California has become the first US state to introduce legal restrictions on the use of single-use straws as part of the fight against plastic pollution in the oceans. At the same time, in some cities on the west coast - for example, San Francisco and Seattle - straws for drinks are already prohibited. Similar bills are already being considered in New York and Washington, and coffee chain Starbucks and several airlines are battling straws privately.

The problem of water pollution with plastic is by no means a joke - most of the garbage ends up in water bodies, where it poses a serious danger to animals and birds. Moreover, microscopic particles and fibers of plastic, as American scientists have found out, are contained even in tap water around the world: most of them were found in water from the USA and Lebanon (94% of water samples contained plastic), as well as India (92%). The least plastic in water comes from Europe - it contained 72% of the samples.

California's straw ban will go into effect on January 1 next year and will only affect restaurants with waiters, not fast food establishments. After two warnings, the establishment will have to pay a $300 fine. Also, as part of the fight against obesity, Brown signed a law that requires that since the new year, the drink in children's meals in fast food establishments should be water or milk by default, but not sugary sodas and juices - they will also have to be requested separately.

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Google's proposed alternative test is called No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA. It is based on Advanced Risk Analysis's own search engine, and generally does not require the user to enter garbled letters and numbers.

"For years we've been asking users to prove they're not robots by recognizing garbled text, but now we've decided it's easier to ask them if they're robots," Google writes in a blog post.

In reCAPTCHA, bots are screened out automatically. The only action the user would ideally need to take is to declare that they are not a robot. Such a statement is made in the form of a tick next to the only item in the input form I'm not a robot - "I'm not a robot".

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Using the open API, reCAPTCHA can be implemented on your own website. According to Google, in addition to its own sites, reCAPTCHA is already used on at least three services: Snapchat, WordPress and Humble Bundle. The success rate for the new type of test is 80% on the Humble Bundle site and 60% on WordPress.

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